The toilet paper roll of life just keeps winding down faster and faster, doesn’t it? Another year has come and gone, and since this will be my final post of 2014, I can now safely look back on the year that was at Evil Squirrel’s Nest without worrying that I might miss something that inevitably falls between the couch cushions of the year end review and the ball drop in Times Square.

Or something that just gets lost in the moment.

I think I can honestly say that 2014 was The Nest’s best year ever… and not just because my blog’s only had two other years to compare it to, but this may be a year I have difficulty matching, let alone topping in 2015. To start with, this past year was bookended by two very popular contests!

In February, after playing Jesse James enough by swooping in to raid the prizes on numerous other blog contests, I finally got aboard the blog giveaway train and held my First Annual Contest of Whatever. For a chance to win a prize from my Cafepress store, all it took was a little creativity involving a squirrel, a possum, and a unicorn. Thirteen bloggers submitted thirteen awesome entries, and in the end, YoungAtFifty and Goldfish picked up the prizes! The Contest of Whatever was so much fun, that you can best believe we’ll be doing it again this coming February!

Not one of the winning entries.

And as is still fresh in your minds, I concluded 2014 with my holiday card contest where the first 20 bloggers to yell, “Yo!” received a hand-drawn and colored character of mine pulled entirely at random from the completed deck. The fact that nobody, including myself, knew which characters were going where made it all the more entertaining. As the results trickled in over the next two weeks, the coveted Rainbow Donkey card continued to be eminently available for those who were still waiting, until it finally became the only card not to show up.

Help!

You could get 100 of the best storytellers of all time and put them at 100 typewriters for 100 years and not get the tragicomic conclusion to this contest that happened in real life. Running Heartless, who had been hoping and hoping for the Rainbow Donkey card, actually was the player who was lucky enough to be dealt it! Only when it showed up in her mailbox, she had no idea what in the hell it was, and had it sent back to me! That threw RD into holiday post office purgatory until after Christmas, when he finally galloped in on my end and I was able to resend him.

Next time, I will kidnap you for good, silly unicorn! You can’t escape The Snuggle Bear!

And in between those two contests was the one series that slowed the year down to a crawl like your fourth grade class. Having run fresh out of Flashback Friday ideas early on in the year, I decided to begin using Fridays to tell my tale of having appeared on the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire back in 2001. I figured it would be a nice way to take up a couple months of Fridays…. until it became painfully obvious to me that my detailed and overly digressive storytelling format was going to drag the tale out over half the year! Beginning on April 11, and not concluding until Part 33 was published on November 21, my saga of The Big Apple, Regis, glowing potatoes, and going Bendy Side Out® kept many of you hooked throughout the Summer and Fall as to just how much nuttier this real life adventure could possibly get.

Hey! Where’s MY mention, ES? I was the STAR of your story after all, and don’t you try to deny it, or I’ll sing again!

My Thursday comic continued to grow and get better with age. I can’t even begin to list my favorites from the year, because there were so many that got a great response. When Sheena sent me Vinyl Scratch from her MLP collection back in May, all she asked in return was a single comic shoutout for her. Instead, Scratchy has joined Buster and Rainbow Donkey as permanent Easter eggs in my comics. She’s been in every comic I’ve drawn since May 1, and will continue to appear forever more…

Now I need to wash the possum guts out of my mane.

Of course, my other longtime series, Saturday Squirrel, continued to treat you to your weekly dose of sciurine cuteness every weekend… and will continue to make stars out of everyday squirrels for years to come!

Yesss!!!! Oh boy, this is awesome!!!

My Flashback Friday spinoff series, Retro TV Ad Tuesday continued to go on as strong as ever through the first half of the year, before hitting a wall in late summer and only popping up occasionally after that. I really need to try to pump some life back into RTVAT, since it accounted for some of my best posts of the year… like my take on Mountain Dew yutes, Hawaiian Punch lunacy, and sciurine madness.

One new weekly series I added to The Nest in June was my tribute to some of the lesser known, but totally awesome songs I got to hear at work… Mecca Muzak Mondays. Now you can all suffer through mine and Mecca’s poor taste in music every Monday to help get your week started off on the right ear foot!

That’s about as much branching out as an introvert like me can stand in one year.

And I know I didn’t cover even close to everything that happened at The Nest in this fascinating year, but man, just from the highlights it was obviously an awesome ride! I thank each and every one of you who rode shotgun on this fantastic voyage with me this year, as all of this fun would never be possible without you all to help inspire me and cheer me on. If the fucked up humor I inject into everything I do has given even one of you a smile or a belly laugh at a time in which you desperately needed it, then all of the time I put into this blog is totally worth it. I appreciate my cyber friendship with all of my followers more than you could ever know, and I hope you’ll all stick around a bit longer to see what The Nest has to offer in 2015!

Awesome wonderful year it was my friend. So much fun indeed! I’m super glad you had a great time hosting my Dear Bacon issue. Eyebrows up – perhaps you would like to do it again in 2015? Snorts and oinks to a great year to come! Keep the evil going! XOXO – Bacon

In my defense…if this hadn’t been my first holiday at my new home, I likely would have just opened the card when it arrived. But I’ve gotten so much mail for other people that I just assumed it was more of that.
But of course it was all worth it for another tale in The Misadventures of Running Heartless

I can’t believe nobody else has taken you up on one of those ponehs! Seriously, what is wrong with people!?!? Maybe you should put on some Sarah McLachlan and announce if they aren’t adopted in one week, you’re taking them on a ride to the glue factory….

What a good year for the nest! I specially love your mecca muzak mondays, I found some real gems for my playlist and I can hiss and spit at the beaver kid , ha! that makes my day :o)
Have a great start in a wonderful 2015!

It’s has been a very good if very strange and rather scary year. Glad we are still here and hope that next year will be better and calmer and happier and we’ll get rich through no fault of our own! Happy New Year, to you and all the critters!

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It’s Contest Of Whatever Time!

Click on the image above to be taken to the official page for the 5th Annual Contest of Whatever! Deadline to enter is March 1st!

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All original artwork uploaded to this blog featuring Evil Squirrel and any of my related characters was created by myself, and is copyrighted by Evil Squirrel, aka Bill Brown, aka me, the publisher of the Evil Squirrel's Nest blog. It may not be used for any commercial purposes whatsoever, but may be shared on your site with due credit and a link to my blog. Thank you for your consideration!

We’ve Expanded!

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